{"id":5313,"date":"2025-09-19T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/deep-cut-friday-tombstone-blues-by-bob-dylan\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T14:00:00","slug":"deep-cut-friday-tombstone-blues-by-bob-dylan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/deep-cut-friday-tombstone-blues-by-bob-dylan\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Cut Friday: \u2018Tombstone Blues\u2019 by Bob Dylan"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2025\/09\/GettyImages-74269202.jpg\" width=\"\" height=\"\" alt=\"Bob Dylan in 1965. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images)\"><\/figure>\n<p><em>Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Bob Dylan\u2019s sixth album <em>Highway 61 Revisited<\/em>, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, opens with the landmark single \u201cLike a Rolling Stone.\u201d The song that follows it on the album, \u201cTombstone Blues,\u201d is far less famous, but Dylan himself thought highly of it. Interviewed by Cameron Crowe for the liner notes of the 1985 box set <em>Biograph<\/em>, Dylan said, \u201cI felt like I\u2019d broken through with this song, that nothing like it had been done before\u2026just a flash really.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More from Spin:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/09\/yungblud-aerosmith-ep\/\">YUNGBLUD Rocks With Aerosmith On \u2018More\u2019 EP<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/09\/5-albums-i-cant-live-without-ken-vasoli-of-the-starting-line\/\">5 Albums I Can\u2019t Live Without:\u00a0Ken Vasoli of the Starting Line<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/09\/patrick-shiroishi-knows-how-memory-works\/\">Patrick Shiroishi Knows How Memory Works<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube videoid=\"ag-Esuy44ks\" style=\"bottom: 0; height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; width: 100%; max-width:100%;\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>An elliptical song about the escalation of the Vietnam War, \u201cTombstone Blues\u201d is full of vivid images and characters, best remembered for one of Dylan\u2019s funniest one-liners: \u201cThe sun\u2019s not yellow, it\u2019s chicken.\u201d Like many of his songs of the era, Dylan and his backing musicians ran through a dozen takes of \u201cTombstone Blues\u201d in a single day, choosing the twelth and final performance for the album. A couple of the alternate takes have appeared on archival releases, some a couple minutes shorter or a couple minutes longer than the <em>Highway 61<\/em> version, all of them featuring fantastic lead guitar performances by Mike Bloomfield.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube videoid=\"mJ_jovZSdGM\" style=\"bottom: 0; height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; width: 100%; max-width:100%;\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>\u201cTombstone Blues\u201d hasn\u2019t been widely covered relative to Dylan\u2019s \u201960s output. But one of his old Greenwich Village folk scene contemporaries, Richie Havens, performed the song for the soundtrack to the deconstructed Dylan biopic <em>I\u2019m Not There<\/em> in 2007. The 1999 live album <em>Sheryl Crow and Friends: Live from Central Park<\/em> ends with an all-star rendition of \u201cTombstone Blues,\u201d with Natalie Maines and Chrissie Hynde passionately tearing through some of the song\u2019s verses.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube videoid=\"HGEbeGzjIxs\" style=\"bottom: 0; height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; width: 100%; max-width:100%;\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>\u201cTombstone Blues\u201d isn\u2019t a major factor in Dylan\u2019s live repertoire\u2014according to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.setlist.fm\/stats\/bob-dylan-1bd6adb8.html\" target=\"_blank\">Setlist.fm<\/a>, he hasn\u2019t played it in concert since 2006, and it\u2019s not among his 100 most performed songs. He has occasionally returned to it on significant occasions, though: \u201cTombstone Blues\u201d opened Dylan\u2019s 1995 episode of <em>MTV Unplugged<\/em>, and was dramatically slowed down for the 2021 performance film <em>Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-three-more-essential-bob-dylan-deep-album-cuts\"><strong>Three more essential Bob Dylan deep album cuts:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-lonesome-death-of-hattie-carroll\"><strong>\u201cThe Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The penultimate track on <em>The Times They Are A-Changin\u2019<\/em> is, more than most of Dylan\u2019s topical songs, largely a straightforward factual account of a news story, the 1963 death of a Baltimore barmaid: \u201cWilliam Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Caroll with a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger at a Baltimore hotel society gathering.\u201d Dylan read about Zantzinger\u2019s paltry six-month sentence for manslaughter on the way home from witnessing Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, and was moved to write a song that slowly builds up in righteous anger.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-man-in-me\"><strong>\u201cThe Man in Me\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>1970\u2019s <em>New Morning<\/em> was well received at the time, but the song \u201cThe Man in Me\u201d was relatively forgotten until Joel and Ethan Coen used it to soundtrack a memorably surreal scene in 1998\u2019s <em>The Big Lebowski<\/em>.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-silvio\"><strong>\u201cSilvio\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>\u201cSilvio,\u201d from 1988\u2019s <em>Down in the Groove,<\/em> is arguably the best song to come out of Dylan\u2019s long association with the Grateful Dead and the band\u2019s lyricist Robert Hunter. Last year President Barack Obama included \u201cSilvio\u201d on his summer playlist and Dylan performed it for the first time in decades.<\/p>\n<p>To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2021\/07\/the-greatest-rock-stars-of-all-time\/?utm_source=yahoo&amp;utm_medium=bottomlink&amp;utm_campaign=yahoolink\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series. Bob Dylan\u2019s sixth album Highway 61 Revisited,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[380,2152,31,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-dylan","category-deep-cut-friday","category-features","category-pushly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}